Off the road again

From a rusty gas tanker and a killer-simple concept in Steven Spielberg's Duel to a slightly scruffy but ultimately well-poised Sandra Bullock in the feel-good romcom Miss Congeniality, we give you a round-up of the latest DVD releases...

Four years before Jaws made crowds pee their loon pants, a young Steven Spielberg gave the same bad PR to motorways. The year was 1971, the 'shark' was a truck and the film was Duel. It was a killer-simple concept. Dennis Weaver plays David Mann, an Everyman with a dead-end job, driving across California. When he cuts up a rusty gas tanker, the unseen driver (does he even exist?) takes umbrage, dedicating the rest of his day to making David roadkill. It's the monster's lack of motive, or of mind, which terrifies the most - seeming to vroom out of our deepest fears and spawning a host of imitators from Hitcher to Jeepers Creepers and beyond. Spielberg's one-track highway to hell is one seriously scary movie.
Extras: Original trailer and three featurettes including a conversation with Spielberg on making the film. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

Spielberg's next feature, The Sugarland Express, might be a kindly and even comical look at two petty criminals on a rather unconventional road trip, but it's entirely lacking the sappiness that makes his current films so hard to swallow. A ludicrously young Goldie Hawn busts her husband out of his last few months of jail-time to reclaim their young son from foster parents. Soon, they've kidnapped a police officer and they're being trailed by every patrol car in Texas - not to mention half the civilian population in the form of rubber-necking well-wishers. Spielberg cannily shades right and wrong - at one point, the outlaws call on the police chief for help - and the debonair camerawork, plus John Williams's unconventional, minimalist score, send this film hurtling down the highway in style.
Extras: None. Nina Caplan

Akira Kurosawa is best remembered for his spectacular samurai flicks, but High And Low, a tense, modern gangster movie adapted from an Ed McBain novel, is up there with the best of them. Toshiro Mifune, almost unrecognisable in suit and neat moustache, is the shoe company executive orchestrating a takeover when bungling kidnappers grab his chauffeur's son instead of his own child. There's still a ransom demand, though, so he must decide whether to break the habit of a lifetime and put another's needs before his own. Kurosawa meticulously examines the inequalities of 1963 Japan without compromising the flow of the action and Mifune, in the penultimate collaboration before a friendship-destroying argument with Kurosawa, shows that he's more than a scowling face.
Extras: None. NC

Miss Congeniality is a feel-good romcom so slight it makes the beauty queens lurching across it look hefty. It does, however, have a few flimsy charms, mainly because it's always fun to watch a slightly scruffy gosling (no way is Sandra Bullock an ugly duckling) transformed into a swan. The far-fetched plot obliges FBI agent Bullock to go undercover as a contestant at a terrorist-threatened beauty pageant. She quickly finds there's more to it than looking nice: she has to walk right, make nice to the other lovelies and even unearth a talent - what's law enforcement compared to the complexities of a beauty contest? Fortunately, pompous queen Michael Caine is on hand with a hairbrush, and soon the gawky agent becomes a model of grace and style. Yes, it is that silly.
Extras: Commentaries, two docs and a sort of Beauty Idol quiz show hosted by none other than William Shatner. NC